'A Tunnel Beckons Where Shadows Surround Me'

Laura deNoves died at the age of thirty-eight in the year 1348, on April 6, Good Friday, precisely twenty-one years, nearly to the minute, after Petrarch first saw her in Avignon. On Saturday, R.S. “Sam” Gwynn reminded us of these events and read Petrarch’s sonnet (translated by Joseph Auslander) commemorating that meeting in 1327:

“It was the morning of that blessèd day

Whereon the Sun in pity veiled his glare

For the Lord's agony, that, unaware,

I fell a captive, Lady, to the sway

Of your swift eyes: that seemed no time to stay

The strokes of Love: I stepped into the snare

Secure, with no suspicion: then and there

I found my cue in man's most tragic play.

Love caught me naked to his shaft, his sheaf,

The entrance for his ambush and surprise

Against the heart wide open through the eyes,

The constant gate and fountain of my grief:

How craven so to strike me stricken so,

Yet from you fully armed conceal his bow!”

Gwynn noted that the anniversary serves as a convenient date on which to observe “the beginning of lyric poetry,” at least in the West. He was in Houston for a poetry reading at our neighborhood library. Three others who “identified” as poets were on the bill. For almost twenty-five years, Gwynn has been coming to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center here in Houston (he lives in Beaumont), and he read several poems that describe the experience. Here is “At the Center” (No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000, 2001):

“The pianist is playing Debussy

Beside the lobby cappuccino bar—

Soft smiles and pastels everywhere. You see,

The point’s not to remind you where you are

Or how you are; the point is not to dwell

On thoughts like these. Look at this normal crowd

Such as you’d find in any good hotel.

But why does no one say its name out loud?

“Later you pass through elevator doors;

Rising to higher levels, you recall

Rumors you’ve heard of rumors from these floors—

How some guests never leave, how they display

A preference for short hair, or none at all,

How no one asks how long you plan to stay.”

Whenever I read that sonnet I’m reminded of Kubrick’s The Shining. Gwynn introduced a related poem, “Bone Scan,” by noting that the title refers to skeletal scintigraphy, which gives you “a very nice picture of what you’re going to look like in about two-hundred years”:

“Shadows surround me, building in the air

Like clouds, were I inclined here to compare

My kingly state to portents in the sky.

I could say the expected: I could lie,

Claiming our long-term forecast will be fair.

“So, family and friends, do not despair.

Shadows mean nothing. There is nothing there.

Knives will find nothing wrong. Still, I know why

                   Shadows surround me.

“The night my father died, I moved my chair

Close to his bed to touch his meager hair

While shadows gathered in his room that I

Might gather I was not too young to die.

Now, circuits close. A tunnel beckons where

                   Shadows surround me.”

Gwynn is a poet of comic realism. Much of the wit derives from looking unhappy reality in the face, without posturing. There is another side to Gwynn’s work. We risk misunderstanding by calling it “religious,” and “spiritual,” that mushy word, will never do. “Christian” is close, though in a thoroughly nondenominational, non-dogmatic sense. He asked the audience if any of us were step-children or had step-parents. Then he read “Something of a Saint” (Dogwatch, 2014), a poem about the man he called “the most famous stepfather in history” – Joseph (the Joiner, as Joyce called him), Mary’s husband. Here is the tenth of the poem’s thirteen four-line stanzas:

  

“So they nailed Him to the dogwood cross his own stepfather made,

And I shook with shame to see Him as I hid there in the shade,

Where I heard the lamentations that my dying stepson made

In the darkness of the noon on Calvary.”